#rachilde

Eliante’s fantastical imagination leads her to channel her sexual energy into her artistic pursuits – juggling, dancing, writing – and she seems satisfied with platonic relationships when it comes to humans.

Eliante's orgasm from The Juggler by Rachilde, 1900. Translation by Melanie Hawthorne:

It was a boudoir hung in old rose crepe, a soft material, garlanded with Bengal lights of Venetian glass which lit up as soon as they crossed the threshold. The furniture seemed fragile, also of crystal. Among the strange knickknacks of Japanese complication or Chinese tortuousness, there was one admirable objet d'art placed in the middle of the room on a pedestal of old rose velvet, like an altar; an alabaster vase the height of a man, so slim, so slender, so deliciously troubling with its ephebe's hips, with such a human appearance, even though it retained the traditional shape of an amphora, that the viewer remained somewhat speechless. The foot, very narrow, like a spear of hyacinth, surged up from a flat and oval base, narrowed as it rose, swelled, at mid-height, to the size of two beautiful young thighs hermetically joined and tapered off towards the neck where, in the hollow of the throat, an alabaster collar shone like a fold of plump flesh, and, higher up, it opened out, spreading into a corolla of white, pure, pale convulvulus, almost aromatic since the white, smooth material with its milky transparence had such lifelike sincerity. This neck spreading into a corolla made one think of an absent head, a head cut off or carried on shoulders other than those of the amphora.

"What a marvel!" cried Leon, completely seduced by this apparition of the adorable chastity of line.

"Isn't it beautiful! Isn't he beautiful," continued Eliante feverishly.

"Oh, he is unique. It's impossible to think of anything more charming. You would think, when the light penetrates it obliquely, that it's inhabited by a soul, that a heart burns in this alabaster urn! You were telling me about pleasure? This is another thing entirely! This is the power of love in an unknown material, the madness of silent delight. He will never say anything. He is very old, centuries old, he has stayed young because he has never cried his secret to anyone." (She came and wrapped her black arms around the amphora's neck.) "Look closely, and try to see for a moment... through my eyes! Come and touch. I give you permission.... Go very gently, too firm a caress would tarnish it." (She seized the young man's hand and moved it carefully over the innocent whiteness of the vase, its virgin's flanks.) "Feel, can't you, that hopeless softness of the curve finally delineated? It won't go any further, for it has reached perfection. It will neither grow nor diminish, it is beauty immutable. Ah, I really want you to know, for at least five minutes, how to be in ecstasy, the right way and over something immortal. You're not laughing any more? It makes you afraid, it makes you ashamed! Oh! I knew quite well you were very intelligent ... because pleasure turns you pale. This miraculous vase is pale with the pleasure of being itself! It has no history. I obtained it through the usual intermediaries, I was going to say procurers! Someone sold it to me in Tunis the way they would have sold a slave. It had been discovered in the excavations... Which excavations? I don't know ... and it was broken, but I had it ... taken care of, the old wound is invisible. It doesn't have a handle. It would be horrible to think his arms had been immobilized forever. And it has no jewel, no inscription, no little dog collar, coral beads or gold Greek bands. I love it for its total innocence. ... And the things he has seen, good heavens? Terrifying things, no doubt, underground, plunged into darkness, for centuries! He will never tell, but he knows ... this charming body in which life has been replaced by perfume, by wine ... or by blood! .... — Perhaps they just pickled olives in it, after all! — I paid very little for it, considering its unique beauty. He is mine. I had this little chapel built for him, but it's too modern. Nothing here reminds him that he was ever anything but a statue ... I regret it. I would have liked to surround him with sacred objects. I want him to be protected from the sun's gaze, I screen him from the daylight so that he can dream in the darkness and silence to his hermetic heart's content. Do you understand, I love him!" (She bent her head over the open neck, and, inhaling with all her might, she appeared, suddenly, to become the living head of the insensate body.) "I pour in rare essences, rose leaves, I threw a ring in there. Sometimes I amuse myself by adorning him with my diamonds, or putting a chain of fresh violets around him . . . and I kiss him, and imagine he's happy. Perhaps he's offended? Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?"

Leon Reille looked at her with superstitious admiration. He was gaining, for this woman, the respect of a young savant already in love with forms, colors, everything that recalled the power of the grace and principal beauty of his life: art, its transposition into the eternal. Yes, certainly, he found that more interesting than the society woman's cackling. If she loved pretty objects to this extent, it was because she had a very highly developed artistic sense; but, as she continued to caress the hips of the alabaster vase, having released the hand of the sensual man, the man madly sensual, to the point of being shy, he winced.

"Leave that alone," he said to her softly. "You're a wretched fanatic, worshipping yourself in what is, in the end, a base material. Alabaster is a product of the earth which, without the men who sculpt it, would remain ... earth ... It would be more charitable to pay attention to your best friend of one evening and give him the favors you are giving to this senseless character. Believe me, my dear, one is in love only with oneself ... that's why more than two can never love decently. Let's not waste time flattering marble. Eliante! My word, your hands are clammy! You are livening up and you seem to be living in honor of . . . this pot?"

The young woman, her eyes half closed, clung more tightly to the neck of the amphora. She pressed both arms around the collar of the stone flesh, and leaned over the corolla of the opening, kissing the void:

"No! No! You don't understand me at all ... but I like you enough to explain. I am truly in love with everything that is beautiful, good, that seems absolute, the very definition of pleasure. But pleasure is not the goal; it's a way of being. Me, I'm always ... happy. I wanted to bring you here to show you that I don't need a human caress to reach orgasm ... It's enough for me to be ...—don't squeeze my arm like that — for I carry within myself the secret of all knowledge by knowing simply how to love. I'm disgusted by union, which destroys my strength, I find no delightful plenitude in it. For my flesh to be roused and to conceive the infinity of pleasure, I don't need to look for a sex organ in the object of my love! I am humiliated because an intelligent man immediately thinks of ... sleeping with me ... Tomorrow you would love me no longer ... if you love me as little as that. Indeed, you don't love me, sir. So what do you claim to be offering me? What confidence can one have in this man who is just passing through? You won't pass through my house ... or you will stay. A thrill? That is not much for someone who is one living thrill! A flame? That is too little for someone who is a whole furnace! My malady? I admit it: I'm dying of love and, like the phoenix, I am reborn, after burning up, with love! Quite simply, It's no more surprising than that, even though it surprises all the doctors. No, I never take off my dress ... only look at me .... I'm dying!"

Eliante, at present standing over the neck of the white amphora, became taut as a bow from head to foot. She was not offering herself to the man; she was giving herself to the alabaster vase, the one insentient person on the scene. Without a single indecent gesture, arms chastely crossed on this slender form, neither girl nor boy, she clenched her fingers a little, remaining silent, then, the man saw her closed eyelids flutter, her lips half open, and it seemed that starlight fell from the whites of her eyes, from the enamel of her teeth; a slight shudder traversed her body — or rather a squall lifted the mysterious wave of her dress — and she gave a small groan of imperceptible joy, the very breath of orgasm.

Either it was the supreme, the splendid manifestation of love, the god actually descending to the temple, or the spectator had in front of him the most extraordinary actress, an artist transcending the limits of possibility in art.

He was dazzled, delighted, indignant.

"It's scandalous! Right there ... in front of me ... without me? No, it's horrible!"

He threw himself on her, intoxicated by a mad fury.

"Actress! Horrible actress!"

She roused herself gently, very calm, smiling, her lips only a little paler under their artificial carmine.

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